


Book-Lovers

by ArabellaStrange



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Domesticity, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-14
Updated: 2017-07-14
Packaged: 2018-12-02 02:53:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11500278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArabellaStrange/pseuds/ArabellaStrange
Summary: Watson reads too loudly. Holmes demands to know what the devil he's reading.





	Book-Lovers

BOOK-LOVERS

  


  


‘ _Love me a little. Let it be thy cheek_  
_With its red signals, that were dear to kiss;_  
_Or, if thou mayest not this,_  
_A finger-tip my own to seek_  
_At night-fall when none guess._  
_Eyes have the wit to speak,_  
_And sighs send messages:_  
_Even give less._

 _‘Love me a little. Let it be in words_ …’

—From ‘Song. Love Me A Little’ in _The Love-Lyrics and Songs of Proteus_ by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, illustrated by William Morris

  


  


I have, for some years—indeed, since my return from the dustier Afghan provinces to the swirling metropole—, been a member of several societies of various interests and purposes, to which I lend what time and energies I can between my engagements with my intimate friend, Sherlock Holmes. Certain local medical societies, including the boards of a few of their attendant journals; my social club, of course, of which I had been a member since joining Her Majesty’s army; another for veterans of that same service, which largely devolved into committees for sport on the rugby pitch, and for the art of drinking truly unconscionable amounts of beer and brandy; a writer’s guild; and so on. Holmes, naturally, is more inclined to the finer arts, music being his preferred medium and subject. (Few of his activities require such tremendous contributions in the forms spirits or gambling debts as any one of mine.)

On one particular Saturday, however, we both found ourselves installed at our rooms at Baker Street, each engrossed in the publications of some of our respective affiliated groups. I had just reached the end of one such monograph when Holmes immediately raised his voice.

‘Watson,’ grumbled the much-tried voice across the room. I looked up, to find Holmes’s aquiline nose still directed towards the crowded pages of the South London Entomological and Natural History Society quarterly.

‘What is the matter, Holmes?’ I asked, innocently as I could, hoping thereby to avoid further grumbling.

It was not to be. ‘If you insist upon perusing those _shameless_ romances to which you are partial, I would ask to do so in _quiet!_ ‘

I sat, astonished. ‘But I am not reading a romance at present.’

Now it was Holmes’s turn to glance my way, bemused. ‘Why, of course you are. I heard the small sighs and approving grunts that are the hallmarks of your experience of the more, shall we say, _Haggard_ of your reading materials.’

I ignore the slight against Mr Haggard, who, as Holmes knew full well, I held neither especial professional nor personal esteem, and instead closed and presented the periodical in my hands.

‘ _Transactions of the Bibliographical Society_ , 1893,’ I read, for his benefit.

He huffed, rolling his eyes and his legs up to sitting in a single swing. ‘Do not think I shall fall for that old trick, my dear fellow, or we certainly have a tempest between us today. You have simply replaced a decade’s old cover and insinuated one of your more _sordid_ tales.’

‘Hah!’ I barked, for had the accusation been less absurd, it might have been insulting. As it was, I merely rose from my chair by the fire. ‘You are losing your touch, old boy, if you cannot deduce better than that.’

I strode over and sat heavily beside him, all but throwing the volume onto his chest. As his feet were then draped elegantly — I should say childishly or impolitely, but as he well knew, I found it familiar and endearing, as I found nearly everything about him — over the arm of our sofa, the sudden arrival of my mass on the seat-cushions served to jostle his head into my shoulder.

For a moment, he flicked through the volume. Then, handing it back over his head to me, he said, feigning indifference, ‘And this has proved _stimulating_ to your tastes?’

However ostensibly neutral his words were, the implication in his note of accusation was clear. He had used just such a tone multiple times in the more recent years of our companionship, almost always to imply that my attentions were straying from their rightful object (viz., himself), and onto less appropriate claimants (usually a pretty young woman).

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I demanded.

‘Watson, do not be obtuse! You were becoming _distracted_ by that book.’

‘Ridiculous.’

‘ _Certain._ ‘

Gaping for a moment at the jest that had now overflowed to sincere grievance, I wondered at his charge. ‘I was, I confess freely, approving of the speech made by Mr Morris to the Society some ten years ago, Holmes, but I was not… not experiencing anything like that…’ I hunted for an apposite word, ‘— _agitation_ you seem to have interpreted.’

‘Read it to me, then,’ he commanded imperiously. ‘The portion of this essay you found so remarkably praiseworthy.’

The fact that a man curled in half on a settee, at half past eleven in the day, still in his dressing gown, could so orchestrate my actions provoked a flicker of rancour in me, matched only by my rising sense of self-righteousness. I had indeed been reading Morris’s long-since delivered address, having stumbled upon an old issue of the thing while tidying my side of bookshelf in our front room. Nor had I ever been in the habit of going to such idiotic subterfuges as to replace one cover for another. In the past, whenever I had wanted to avoid Holmes knowing — or, since that often was a hopeless aim, to avoid at least his jibing — I simply waited until he was out, or until I was alone in my rooms. But it had been years since I hidden anything from him at all; the teasing was taken in stride; and my appetite for reading, certainly of a companionable afternoon, tended now towards the philosophical, rather than the melodramatic.

Thus I opened the smooth pages with a careful, deliberate slide of hands across paper. Holmes would yet eat his words, if I had anything to do with it.

‘“The Ideal Book,”’ I read. ‘“Delivered at the Bibliographical Society, London, ninet—”’

‘Yes, yes, obviously you would have to be so entirely sensible to stimulation as to make daily life impossible, if that were going to get your blood up! Move along, please.’

‘You know, Holmes, it is a terrible thing to rush into a piece of reasoning without first establishing — ‘

‘Oh, take yourself off, then, and enjoy your “piece of reasoning”!’ He shuffled up, drawing himself completely away from any bodily contact with me, and huddling in a space I fancy even smaller than that which he had previously occupied on the cushion, stubbornly pretending to resume reading his own article.

Smirking, I turned the page over, searching for — yes: ‘“The fact is, a small book seldom does lie quiet, and you have either to cramp your hand by holding it, or else to put it on the table with a paraphernalia of matters to keep it down, a table-spoon on one side, a knife on another, and so on, which things always tumble off at a critical moment, and fidget you out of the repose which is absolutely necessary to reading. Whereas, a big folio lies quiet and majestic on the table, waiting kindly till you please to come to it, with its leaves flat and peaceful, giving you no trouble of body, so that your mind is free to enjoy the literature which its beauty enshrines.”’

I paused here, at the conclusion of one of Morris’s paragraphs, to peer side-ways at Holmes. After a moment of stillness, Holmes unfurled his long body and rose, lithe as ever, to fetch some tobacco from the persian slipper. I took this as a signal that, rather than abuse, I should I expect his further attention. I carried on.

‘“… a book ornamented with pictures that are suitable for that, and that only, may become a work of art second to none, save a fine building duly decorated, or a fine piece of literature.

‘“These two latter things are, indeed, the only absolutely necessary gift that we should claim of art. The picture-book is not, perhaps, absolutely necessary to man’s life, but it gives us such endless pleasure, and is so intimately connected with the other absolutely necessary art of imaginative literature that it must remain one of the very worthiest things towards the production of which reasonable men should strive.”’

Upon this summa, I allowed my voice to linger, appreciating — as evidently I had done, so distractingly, a short time earlier — the spirit and aspirations of the final lines.

‘“Reasonable men,”’ Holmes muttered, through pipe-clenching lips.

It was on my tongue to inquire whether Holmes found fault with the argument itself, or if he was sufficiently convinced that I had enjoyed nothing more tawdry or licentious than a well-turned phrase on the timeless question of beauty itself. Yet I remained mute, awaiting either a debate or an apology, uncertain just then which (if either) I inwardly saw forthcoming.

‘And this,’ Holmes reflected, at length, ‘is inflaming to your passions?’

I grimaced uncomfortably. ‘No! Good God, Holmes, I said nothing of either passions or such excitement! It was you who —’

‘You did not hear yourself, Watson,’ Holmes interrupted. ‘You groaned in approval; you positively hummed with pleasure.’

His dark eyes alighted upon me at last, and I found there not so much accusation as… bewilderment.

‘I…’ This was, for some reason I could not then yet fathom, of some important to him: a matter of confusion; a misapprehension he wished not merely to correct, but to forestall repeating. ‘I suppose I did find his account of the unruly book, breaking free to interrupt the absorbed reader like an infant wresting free of its nurse, rather comical — but as much truth as humour in that. It has happened to me a hundred times, at least. And at least a hundred more times, I have seen you draping all manner of things, pipettes and your favourite magnifying glass, your own scarves — all sorts of objects! — over the haphazard _field_ of materials you spread open, the better to survey the lay of the land, when you are engrossed in a subject.’

Moving slowly about the room, he inclined his head.

‘And that is precisely the brilliance of the point: it is a common experience,’ I added. ‘And then to conclude his speech about — well, you did not read the initial paragraph’ (he scowled) ‘but there was a great deal about spacing between letters and margins and letter design and that sort of thing: he is a designer and craftsman, as you will recall. But to conclude a piece which had begun with such workmanlike precision with such soaring notions about beautifying the very clay and pap of the world around us, of making even the most mundane volume of pages and words into something almost magical in its ability to arrest and consume the attention, to consume the senses from within with enjoyment, appreciation — ‘

‘Pleasure?’ He was looking pointedly at me.

‘It is his word, and I do not quite deny it,’ I replied. 

His mouth was a pursed line, but his brow had unknotted somewhat, so allowed myself a moment of indulgence.

‘Surely you too have felt the rapturous feeling of holding something lovingly, attentively made, an object both vulnerable to destruction and infinitely powerful in its potential to inspire, to enlighten and uplift, and on top of all this one that is, outside of all rationality and logic, simply splendid to behold? I have seen you at your microscope, at your experiments and your chemical notations, with just such enchanted delight. You will not even attempt to deny it.’

Fractionally Holmes smiled, his eyes sliding down to my hands, which no doubt had become fervent accomplices to my cause as I got, I confess, quite swept up in the proving of my point. Hands, it struck me, that had caressed the wings of his shoulders and the locks of hair falling like ivy tendrils across his forehead, grasping at once the fragility and the strength of him. _He_ delighted me, and (though I blush to force the point) I believe at times that I delighted him.

‘Morris, though I am no great devotee of either his textiles nor his politics, undeniably feels what he says here. And I suppose,’ I considered, watching as Holmes regained his seat, this time with his body invitingly angled towards mine, ‘to feel the fervour of that feeling after ten years, as though he were in the room…’

Holmes’s left arm draped across the back of the sofa, coaxing me to relax into it. ‘You were distracted.’

I chuckled. ‘Not quite in the way you meant perhaps, but possibly in another.’

There was then a companionable silence, a pause of mutual agreement; that we were both silly men, that we ought to put off more reading and instead partake of a mild afternoon with no cases, no patients, no black moods to attend to. At last Holmes set his pipe on the resting dish on the table before us.

‘I shall be sincerely put out if I find that you go on pouring your moans into old volumes of dry socialist pamphlets, rather than finding other objects for your aesthetic curiosity.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘I usually reserve such flights of fancy for when I compose my stories of you.’

‘Shameless romances, my dear Watson.’

As I kissed him, with the sparks of affection and hunger which he alone excited in me, I allowed inwardly that perhaps he was partly right after all.

  


  


  


  


  


*

**Author's Note:**

> [A very short fic that came to me when reading the Morris piece Watson is reading, called "[The Ideal Book](https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1893/ideal.htm)" (1893). The South London Entomological and Natural History Society was a real society, as was the Bibliographic Society, both functioning at the turn of the century.]
> 
> {p.s. William Morris is brilliant, his socialism is brilliant, Watson is just an old curmudgeon.}


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